Our newbie greeters responded within three minutes of the player connecting. Staff members are not robots. We have real lives; we also play on the game. Sometimes we look away from the screen. Sometimes we're in the middle of typing a pose in another window and don't click back to our staff window right away to find out what's blinking at us. This player misconstrued what staff was trying to tell her. We did not mean that anyone who we know gets a special character regardless of application quality. For something like a half-veela, which is what Victory was looking for, we always require an absolutely stellar app, even from a staff member. It raises a great big red flag when a player can't understand why we would want them to play for a while before we hand them a restricted or feature character. We never ask our players to jump through hoops or 'do a little dance' to impress us. What we are watching for is players who don't twink and who don't cause OOC issues with the rest of the players. We have a mix of longtime roleplayers and players who are starting on their first game both amongst the playerbase and the staff; we meant no disrespect to this player's experience, but every game has a different set of rules and interacts differently on a social level. In the nearly five years since Hogwarts Express opened we have seen time and time again that a player who makes a normal character, settles in, and then goes for a restricted or feature has more success both in finding approval and in integrating the restricted character into the rest of the game. A review of our newsfiles and bboard posts would have helped the player understand our game focuses on the wizards and witches of the HP universe. Unlike a superheroes or WoD game, where the majority of characters involve applications and are 'special', characters such as part veela, vampires, or werewolves are extremely limited on Hogwarts Express - to the extent that out of 500 characters, there are less than 10 of these types of characters. It's unfortunate that this player felt we were 'lacking in social skills and helpfulness' and that our 'priorities are out of alignment.' Our large, happy playerbase seems to indicate otherwise. She had the poor luck of logging in on a busy evening when many of our staff members were paying attention to real life rather than a computer game. By the way, instructions to access the newbie channel are available in the description of the Limbo room all new characters connect in. A certain degree of literacy is required to play a text-based game that relies so heavily on roleplay like Hogwarts Express.

I've found Hogwarts Express very enjoyable, unlike this author. I will not comment on the =new argument. I also did not see the alert in the first room, but that was just because I was in a hurry. According to the other commenter, response to him was granted within 3 minutes. That's /fast/ for a MUSH. These people have lives. I hadn't even tried to make contact by the type one of them paged me. Read the +help and NEWS files. They have useful information. The request to make another character before a restricted one is perfectly reasonable. Many MUSHes make it a /requirement/, such as Elendor. There, you have to play for, I think it's 3 weeks and turn in an RP Log before you can apply for a restricted character. RPing style /is/ important for a restricted character. If you're one of 50 RCs, maybe one of 2 or 3 of course species, if that, people are going to want to RP with you. If your RPing style is horrible, they're not going to enjoy it, they're going to stop RPing with you, and the RC spot you were given was just wasted. I think it is this author who is lacking in social skills, who needs to read, and who needs to learn the realities of MUSHing.